圣诞老人会给我送礼物吗：一节关于“相信什么”的儿童哲学课

A Christmas-week online class, Dr Zhihao Yan in a London sitting room and the children in Shanghai, where the decorations this year are everywhere. He does not start with Father Christmas but with Ultraman, whom every child dismisses at once as an actor in a suit, then the earth god, ghosts and aliens, where the hands go up unevenly. Then dinosaurs, which every child is certain about — and nobody has seen. Pressed on what counts as evidence, they produce fossils, palaeontologists, museum specimens, until one child suggests the fossils might be an oddly shaped rock and dinosaurs the biggest hoax in the history of science. From there: inference from frequent experience, inference from habit, and inference that is only a wish. A boy who would give his ten yuan to the Jade Emperor because he outranks the others reinvents Pascal's wager, and says why in three characters: it doesn't lose.